Inside the Game: Epic Mickey

Disney Epic Mickey is months away from release, but the work
involved in its creation began years ago. Anyone who has perused the
November 2009 issue of Game Informer understands the project’s dramatic
scope and ambition. However, we can only fit so much information in the
magazine. In our first Inside the Game online feature, we follow the
art and animation development from concept to implementation to get a
better sense of how Mickey and his world came to life. Don’t miss your
first-ever chance to see early animation tests of Mickey and his
friends in action. The World

Caption:
Even a small section or level takes many steps to emerge into gameplay.
In Epic Mickey, special 2D side-scrolling levels interconnect the
larger 3D areas. Every one of these 2D images is based on an old Disney
cartoon classic. This area was based on Clock Cleaners, a 1937 cartoon
starring Mickey, Donald, and Goofy. Using scenes from the original as
inspiration, the team creates a colored concept art piece to illustrate
the idea of the level. Designers work together with the artists to
shape the level, and indicate the motions of the many cogs, gears, and
platforms in the scene. With those directions in hand, the team can
implement a three-dimensional, functional version. Finally, Mickey can
jump into action and the level can begin being tested and modified.

The
process of level creation begins as a collaborative project; as the
development team throws around ideas for game design and story the
artists begin work on concept art in earnest.

“It starts on
paper with the general idea of the storyline that Warren [Spector] is
going for,” explains art director Lee Harker. “We read on paper the
general gist of what the level or the area is supposed to be, and we
just start firing off ideas all over the place. At that point Warren
will come by and we’ll review the work and talk about general direction
that we want to go for in each of these areas. Once we nail in on
something, it’s just a matter of refining it and refining it until we
have it just right.”

Caption:
Concept art serves a far more important role than being inspirational
imagery or fodder for magazine articles. Good concept art can help
guide or inform the development of an entire stage of the game.

From
early on, the game featured story elements that emerged from the
history of Mickey Mouse, which the art needed to reflect. “You’ve got
this wealth of subject matter out there that’s known all around the
world and respected by so many people. It’s just an honor to be able to
work with that, and it’s a big responsibility as well,” Harker admits.
“You’ve got to continue on top of all these great artists that have
come before you and build off of it.”

The Brave Little Tailor

Caption: Early tests
like this one help to try out the model of the main character, and
inspire actions and movements that may eventually emerge into gameplay.
This one is based on a scene from the Mickey classic The Brave Little
Tailor. If you cannot see the video, click here.[PageBreak]Caption:
The style of the cartoon and inert objects in the world shouldn’t be
difficult to spot, thanks to clever visualization by Junction Point.
Toon objects can be created and erased by the player; inert objects are
permanent and real, and double as a way to put limits on the shape of
the world.

While the concepts embraced the long history of
a beloved character, Spector’s vision for the game took Mickey in a new
direction. Much of that tonal shift was established under the eye of
Rolf Mohr, the visual development director on the project in its early
days.

“I look at our game even now a while out from shipping –
I’m prejudiced obviously – but I think it looks fantastic,” Warren
Spector tells us. “I gave Rolf a nearly impossible task. I said, ‘We’re
creating a world where we have to have this painted, bright, cartoony,
puffy marshmallow look side-by-side with this gray, blasted, dark,
twisted, pointy, inert look.’” The resulting art style that Mohr and
the rest of the team created was a mix of aesthetics, using familiar
visual cues of colors and angles to help gamers immediately identify
the different objects and creatures on screen.

Caption:
Early in the game, Mickey finds himself under examination in the Mad
Doctor’s lab. The original version of this lab was nearing completion
when members of the art team became increasingly dissatisfied with
their first attempt. Much of the lab level was scrapped, and a new
version was developed over several weeks and put into place. “It just
became apparent that we could really do a whole lot better,” art
director Harker says. “So the team decided they wanted to take that on
themselves, and they pretty much lived here for three weeks to get it
right on their own.”

With the art style established, concept
artists begin their work in earnest. In the case of Epic Mickey, the
art team maintains a constant contact with the level design team. It’s
an essential cooperation, since the central gameplay mechanic revolves
around a paintbrush that can paint in and erase elements of the world
as a player moves through the game. “If you look at the cartoon stuff
in the world, all of that is supposed to be stuff players can affect,”
Harker explains. “So that ties directly into the game’s design. You
can’t have it be a complete free-for-all where we just put colorful
cartoon stuff everywhere, and that mucks up the design where you’re
able to access areas that the designers don’t want you to.”

Swinging into Action

Caption: Watch
carefully as Mickey swings onto the vine. You can see the way his body
stretches past its normal proportions to give the illusion of being
pulled in one way and then another. Because he is a cartoon, his
morphing shape isn’t jarring the way it might be with a more realistic
human character. Interestingly, this animation technique was pioneered
at least in part by Walt Disney and his studio when they created the
early Mickey Mouse cartoons in the 1920s and ‘30s. If you cannot see the video, click here. [PageBreak]Caption:
These three simple images illustrate the central gameplay mechanic of
Epic Mickey. Paint is used to fill in blank, glittering spaces, and
thinner can erase objects. At times, players can erase sections of an
object, utilizing the new shape of the object as a platform to ascend
to a different location. In many ways, the game aims to let the player
design his or her own path through a level. From an art perspective,
objects like this bookshelf pose unique challenges. Not only must the
object be interesting to look at, but also it also must be an
integrated part of the level design.

Environment artists
take the concept art and integrate it into a 3D framework through an
imaging program called Maya. The environment team then changes size and
shape of objects in a way that helps guide the players through the
world. The level designers continue to contribute the necessary
elements so the levels emerge as engaging and fun playgrounds. By this
point, the designers and other parts of the development team can jump
into a rough version of an environment and begin playtesting. But to do
so, another major component has to be progressing at the same pace –
characters.

Caption:
Dozens of images from multiple artists help to establish the look,
color, lighting, and overall vision for a given level. If you’ve spent
any time at Disneyland, you’ll also notice how much the Gremlin Village
has in common with the “It’s a Small World” attraction.

[PageBreak]Characters and Animation

By
necessity, the character artists need to stay one step ahead of those
working on the environments and levels. “They’ve got to have the
characters done in time to get them to the animators. So we want those
guys way out in front,” Harker says.

Caption:
Character artists on Epic Mickey begin with numerous exploratory
sketches that establish the overall style for a character. If they have
an existing reference, they work off of that as a starting point. In
the case of the Mad Doctor, the artists looked back to the 1933 cartoon
in which he first appeared. After sketches, the team creates colored
character images and passes them off to be rendered in 3D.

The
character artists’ most important focus is obviously Mickey, as players
constantly interact with him. Dozens of versions of Mickey Mouse are
created and scrapped, exploring any number of ways to interpret the
classic character. At times, these new versions are elongated and
modern, and at other times they stay as close as possible to older
interpretations of the character. As of now, the team has settled on a
colorful version of Mickey that reflects how he appeared in the 1930s –
mischievous and cartoony. However, Spector demands a character that
alters in response to player actions, so the character art team must
create three Mickeys – a dark scrapper, a middle-of-the road version,
and a heroic version. Each one poses differently and looks different,
and the distinction needs to be sharp enough for players to recognize
at a glance.

Caption:
“How you decide to play the game should make a difference. You get to
determine what kind of hero you are. Everybody solves the problem.
Everybody saves the day. Everybody gets to save the world and gets the
girl,” Warren Spector tells us, in regards to the shifting spectrum of
play styles that change the appearance of Mickey throughout the game.
“But how you do it, and how you end up looking is up to you. What
abilities you have is up to you. Who likes you is up to you. What
missions you hear about or not is up to you.” Each version of Mickey
has a distinct look crafted by the character artists at Mickey, from
the crouching and feral scrapper to the stalwart hero.

Even
after a nearly complete version of Mickey is ready to go, the character
artists have plenty of work to do right through the end of the project.
New characters are added all the time, but the goal is to give more
complicated and important characters the attention early, as they will
be the ones that have the most complex and involved animation sets to
complete.

[PageBreak]Caption:
Junction Point has developed a brand new antagonist to fit into Disney
lore. The beetleworx are built by the Mad Doctor, and they act as a
maintenance crew to the game world. Unlike many potential enemies in
the game, they can’t be fully erased by Mickey’s magic paintbrush, so
the art team had an interesting challenge to overcome: shape a
potential enemy formed of both sharp, inert objects and marshmallowy
cartoon shapes. Their solution lay in pulling together elements from
across the familiar Disney theme park landscape and combining them on
top of a metallic framework. Careful viewers will see elements from
across Disney fiction combined together on this figure.

Animators
keep in close contact with the character artists long before they begin
bringing them to life. “We don’t want to overcomplicate things, but we
also want to make sure that when the animation finally gets to us, all
our needs can be met, and that we’re not creating something that’s
going to be a problem down the road,” explains lead animator Jorma
Auburn. The goal is to keep the character artists in the loop on what
requires time and energy to animate and compute. “If it is going to be
an ambient creature, and you want to have a lot of them on the screen,
then having a bug with 20 legs is not the way to go,” Auburn says.

Caption:
Warren Spector hopes to reinvigorate Mickey’s adventures by taking
familiar characters and casting them in unfamiliar situations. In the
wasteland world of Epic Mickey, many of Mickey’s best friends have been
recreated as animatronic look-alikes.

Character
artists/modelers then work with rigging to shape a 3D version. A
character rig is an essential component of the process, since it
dictates the actual in-game form of a character. “It’s the
infrastructure, all the joints and bones,” Auburn explains. “At some
game studios that I’ve worked at in the past, the animators also did
the rigging. Thank goodness we’re not doing that here. These rigs are
way too complex for us to do that. I’ve found that when you separate
the roles, you get better results on both ends.”

Caption: Many
types of blotlings show up throughout the game, but the spatters shown
here are the simplest and stupidest of the bunch. The artists have gone
to great lengths to create numerous versions so they remain fresh
whenever and wherever they show up in the game. Likewise, the animation
team has built a wealth of short but amusing motions and actions for
the little guys.

With
a character like Mickey rigged up, the animators then have a “really
cool puppet to play with,” as Auburn describes it. They can begin
testing the character’s boundaries – how far can he stretch, what poses
can he take, what emotions can he project given his facial structure,
etc. With Epic Mickey, the animators have the advantage of decades of
Disney animation to inspire and direct their choices. Mickey’s
tradition also allows them to explore ideas that would be impossible in
a more realistic setting. Many studios would have a hard time depicting
a gritty space marine who can walk away from an anvil that drops on his
head, but the animation team on Epic Mickey has the tools to pull it
off, even if it mean days or even weeks of animation work to get the
squashed and stretched version of the character to appear correctly
after the anvil falls.

Always Two Round Ears

Caption: Almost
every time you’ve ever seen Mickey Mouse in action, you’ve seen the
silhouette of both his ears. It’s actually a directive for the use of
the character straight from Disney. Even when moving through a 3D
environment, the animation team has to account for both his ears, and
make the familiar shape apparent whichever way Mickey runs and jumps. If you cannot see the video, click here.

Pulling Together

Modern
development studios can ill afford having departments working in
isolation, and Junction Point is no exception. Throughout our visit, we
witnessed the iterative process that interconnects different sections.
The animators keep in constant contact with those implementing,
playing, and testing the game. The artists respond to needs for new
environments and characters as they emerge, requiring a constant effort
throughout the development cycle.

If this iterative process
succeeds, Epic Mickey could put the mouse back on the map. Modern 3D
techniques finally allow for the team at Junction Point to present a
Mickey Mouse game with the cartoon sensibilities that have been present
in his films for decades. Colorful, humorous characters fill the cast,
and the environments pull inspiration from classic Disney iconography.
Simultaneously, the game introduces a dark and twisted element to
Mickey’s world that stands in sharp contrast to his normal environs.
It’s a visual framework primed to catapult him back into stardom.